“Actually,” Donovan said, “I was hoping you might have a contact with the state police in Virginia.”
“I can probably help,” Hoover said.
“What is it you need?”
“You know somebody that can fix a speeding ticket?” Donovan asked.
Hoover looked at him in genuine surprise.
“Seventy-three-point-six in a thirty-five-mile zone,” Donovan said, straight faced
“The cop said that we’d probably lose our C-ration sticker, too.”
Hoover smiled.
“Darn you, Bill,” he said.
“You really had me going there for a minute.”
“Oh, Edgar, you know better than that. I’d never ask you to fix a speeding ticket.”
“You didn’t really get one, did you?” Hoover asked.
“Less than an hour ago,” Donovan said.
“On the way here. But don’t worry about it, Edgar. I’m going to ask the boss for a presidential pardon.”
Hoover’s smile was now strained.
“As soon as we get our business out of the way, Edgar, we’re headed for Warm Springs,” Donovan said.
“On his way down there. Franklin’s always in a very good mood. He’ll take care of the speeding ticket, I’m sure.”
Hoover marched ahead of him toward the dining room. He knew the way.
Donovan glanced at Charity Hoche. She smiled and gave him a nod of approval.
He had put Hoover off balance, and with consummate skill that Charity appreciated. First, by the suggestion of an insult: that the nation’s ranking law-enforcement officer, Mr. G-Man himself, would fix a speeding ticket, and then with the announcement that he was going to Warm Springs with President Roosevelt (whom he was privileged to call by his first name) on a trip on which Hoover had obviously not been invited.
There were very few people who could discomfit J. Edgar Hoover. Donovan, Charity thought, could play him like a violin.
The table was set for three.
Charity waited until they were seated, then started to leave.
“I’ll serve now, if that would be all right,” she said.
“Fine,” Donovan said, and then, as if he had just thought of it, “Oh, Charity, there “was one more cable from London, a personal to me from Stevens.”
“Something I should know about?”
“I want you to get it decoded,” Donovan said.
“The message is “Katharine Hepburn’s Fine by The.”” She smiled at him. It needed no decoding. Donovan had apparently cabled It. Colonel Ed Stevens, Deputy Chief of London Station, asking how he felt about Charity’s being transferred there. Making light of her Main Line Philadelphia accent, Charity was known as “Katharine Hepburn.”
“Oh, Uncle Bill,” Charity blurted, and ran to him and kissed him wetly on the cheek.
“Thank you!”
“Serve dinner, Miss Hoche,” Donovan said.
“The Director looks hungry.”
Hoover did not turn over his glass when a middle-aged maid produced the bottle of Chateau de Long ’35.
Donovan interpreted this as a good sign: that Hoover had not come to this meeting with a litany of OSS offenses against the FBI.
The relationship between the Director of the FBI and the Director of the OSS was complex. When a new broom had been needed to sweep out the scandal-ridden Federal Office of Investigation, the post had been offered to Donovan, both because of his public image as a war hero of untainted honesty, and because of his political influence. He had declined, and taken some effort to see that the job went to J. Edgar Hoover, then a young Justice Department lawyer. When the FBI was established in 1935, Hoover–again with Donovan’s support–was named its first director.
By the time Donovan returned to public service, shortly before the war, as the $1.00-per-annum Coordinator of Information, the predecessor organization to the OSS, Hoover had become a highly respected fixture in Washington, very nearly above criticism.
The FBI was without question the most efficient law-enforcement agency the nation had ever known, and the credit was clearly Hoover’s.
And when the idea of a super agency to sit atop all the other governmental intelligence agencies came up, Hoover perhaps naturally presumed that it would fall under the FBI. He was bitterly disappointed when that role was given to the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and his old friend and mentor Bill Donovan was named as its head.